Why would they need to disable turbo? I believe nobody is hitting the CPU performance limits just to have a fps limit or rely on the raw performance for timing, whereas this could improve some load times or improve performance during context switching.Reply

Consoles have fixed performance hardware to prevent games & applications performing differently on different hardware revisions. If you bought a PS4 today and then next week a new version was released (but likely not announced) that made games smoother / more playable then you would have the right to be annoyed.Reply

There's nothing stopping Sony or Microsoft from launching a "performance edition" PS4 or XBOX One with a hardware bump that simply added antialiasing, etc, to games.

This has already been done over the years with Nintendo offering the 4MB RAMBUS upgrade for the N64, and various performance storage options for XBOX 360/PS3 to assist load times of disc-based games. The SSD-edition of the 360 can load games/levels virtually instantly compared to running from disc or disk.Reply

1. When Microsoft or Sony want to increase performance, they only do so via software updates that don't destabilize the platform as a whole. Neither can afford to break millions of consoles with a bad update or segregate the community into two camps. On the other hand, if developers of individual games find a way to improve framerates or AA, they can submit updates for download - but only after it is tested by the console manufacturers.2. I have the 4MB upgrade for my N64, only TWO games required it, a very small percentage of N64 games supported it, and even fewer truly benefited from it. It's mild success was due entirely to ZMM, DK, and PD, but Nintendo hasn't tried anything like it since. (Lest we forget the 64DD...)3. Only Sony lets you install any drive you want. Most reviews from those that have upgraded to SSDs say it just isn't worth it. It's a consumer option, not something Sony changes at the platform level. The games still run at the same speed with the same textures.4. There is no consumer "SSD Edition" Xbox 360 and they won't let you install one (officially). Are you referring to the 4GB Slim? That's not an SSD and most 360 games are too big to install onto it.5. I have yet to see a console SSD upgrade result in anything instantaneously... except regret. :DReply

Consoles are to be 'fixed spec' so that game developers know exactly what to expect in terms of hardware. The lone exception has been storage capacity. The N64 memory expansion is an excellent example of why developers aim for the lower guaranteed spec: only three games required it with a handful of games that'd use it if present.

Both MS and Sony could come out with a hardware revision that does a bit more outside of gaming without impacting game developers. For example, MS could release an Xbox One with a digital tuner + DVR hardware. Such a change would have no impact to the gaming side of things. Ditto if MS or Sony were to add backwards compatibility via hardware: it'd be unavailable to use in an Xbox One or PS4 game.Reply

There was a late revision of the original PlayStation where the GPU got significantly faster for some operations, which resulted in higher frame rates in some games. (This was when the debug units switched from blue to green, in order to differentiate).Reply

Although I don't think it would happen, or at least be publicly announced, Microsoft could use these new cores in Xbox One but could only enable turbo for the two cores that run the virtualization and Xbox OS. They would also benefit from the reduced TDP, which is something that eventually happens at some point anyway.Reply

Now that comment on the OS and virtualization cores was quite interesting. I now thing that a Puma-edition is likely (though I think a GPU switch-up is more likely if more efficient GCN variants occur.Reply

No sense revising an entire chip to save a few watts of power. They might revise it later provided that substantial power savings are attainable, otherwise will implement the usual die shrinks. Minor performance increases shouldn't be ruled out although focus will be on power reduction while maintaining similar performance.Reply

And this is what happens when AMD gets into gear and makes a new architecture. Real improvement that's competitive with rivals. Common.... new Desktop flagship architecture that's faster and more efficient? please?Reply

Judging by the performance story thus far, I think it will put to bed the calls for cat cores to replace AMD's higher powered offerings. Yes, we're past K8 performance levels now, but Llano and Trinity (let alone Richland/Kaveri) still have it beat. You'd need some serious clock speeds to get decent performance and it's the wrong silicon for that.

I was disappointed to see that it's practically the same uarch as Jaguar, meaning we're still going to have a single channel memory controller, however the performance and power improvements are substantial, and the memory controller has been improved anyway which should reduce the need for said controller.Reply

I think it's hard to draw conclusions of core performance when the RAM is a limitation. It's entirely possible that these cores are still pretty far from the big cores, but on the other hand it's possible that more bandwidth could up performance by quite a few percent.Reply

It seems that most of the power reduction is at the manufacturing level; maybe it's more accurate to engineering tolerances or perhaps a more pure silicon, either way I don't think TSMC will be telling us what it is. The rest comes from eliminating circuitry that provides some more flexibility to OEMs, something nVIDIA has been doing for a couple years now, and while it doesn't reallycount, it's something Apple does very well.Reply

But very little detail on the memory controller - how wide is it? From what I can see it's just single channel. Personally I think these Puma cores would serve AMD a lot better as a low power Opteron CPU than ARM would, equivalent to Intel's Avoton package, provided they can use a significant amount of memory on a system - a single channel won't cut it.Reply

Disagreed. It was a matter of performance for cost, and even though each Jaguar core may perform half as well as a high end desktop core, they were able to fit 8 cores into less die space than those bigger cores would have taken. If a developer takes good advantage of multithreading they'll be fine for a while. Reply

Are you kidding? Engines mean that things can be more threaded as it's more abstracted and so more time can be spent on threading (as opposed to rewrites and higher-level coding that a smaller team would deal with).Reply

Oh look another AMD product launch with regressive performance... and yet another AMD product launch where their power usage is double that of the competition. Still I suppose it's an improvement, they could be at 4x the power usage now if they hadn't finally done some work. Well I suppose they can just lay off another 25% of the company, that'll sure help close the gap..Reply

Anything tagged AMD gets the AMD Center branding, regardless of the content (which's lead to an occasional giggle-snort situation in with articles that are 99% Intel/nVidia but mention AMD for comparison purposes). Look at the by line, this was written by Anand, not one of the AMD PR drones.Reply

there is info here and you see that it can very well compete with intel parts or even better in many parts. the problem is that many bench just wont run on the low end atom GPU wise :). you need the celeron version to compare performance to mullinReply

All of the CPU tests are compared to Intel parts, including the direct competitor: Intel's Bay Trail based Atom both in the ASUS Transformer Book T100 as well as numbers from Intel's Bay Trail tech day using the Atom Z3770.Reply

A substantial performance increase over its predecessor is regressive? And if you insist comparing to AMDs big cores.. well, have fun putting these into a tablet!

2x the power consumption? You seem to refer to idle power compared to Snapdragon 600, a SoC which is significantly slower and hence - just like the big cores - in a different category.

Beema / Mullins seems to occupy a very interesting point on the performance/power/price curves. It's obviously not for smartpones yet and neither for big gaming rigs. But for anything in between it's at least an intersting option.Reply

Hey Anand,Do you know if connected standby was enabled on the Mullins tablet you tested? I’ve heard that AMD has not yet developed the connected standby drivers yet. If this is the case, then shouldn’t that be noted in the power consumption test? Given the improvements Intel sees when connected standby is enabled, it definitely looks like the Mullins tablet was not using connected standby.Reply

They aren't low power enough yet, so in the mean time, I suspect nVIDIA's Jetson board based off the Tegra K1 might fit the spot you are thinking of. The board is significantly larger, but its powerful enought to justify that. It's also more in the Beagleboard/Pandaboard segment, being aimed at embedded development and not education.

The Tegra K1 rated at 5W TDP, the Mullins rated at 3.95W - 4.5W TDP, i think they should be low power enough for a single board computer, i saw the price for the Jetson TK1, it was 3 times higher than the Raspberry Pi, hope that AMD will come out something at the middle of the Raspberry Pi and Jetson TK1, with the price lower than the Jetson TK1, and the performance better than the Raspberry Pi.Reply

It's good to see AMD catching up but the power consumption may still be a deciding factor when choosing between this and Baytrail - I look forward to a full review of release hardware. The other area of concern is that the Baytrail successor Airmont (with shrink to 14nm and ~30% power savings) will also be out in 2014 so AMD may only have 0-3 months at parity/competitiveness with intel. Reply

Yeah, power consumption has been AMDs Achilles heel for some time now both on the high end for performance and on the low end for battery life. And suddenly they can put the performance of a 15W Kabini in a 4.5W Mullins? If this holds up when it's actually released and reviewers can run real tests on it - battery tests would be extremely interesting - it could be a real winner. Assuming that people want x86 tablets though, I think the jury is still out on that.Reply

How could this compete with Atom?????Atom have way lower TDP SDP or whatever power consumption they call it...Atom have no problem surpassing the performance of this thing...Price maybe AMD's advantage, but low power devices are still filled with high profit devices, also it's TDP may cause bad battery life, with may not be taht cost efficient afterall...So why AMD still trying to compete here??Reply

It wrecks anything silvermont based in benchmarks, Thing is mullins will not make a lot of gains in tablets, no android support and free intel chips, Beema will make some gains on baytrail until christmas.Reply

I think it will put to bed the calls for cat cores to replace AMD's higher powered offerings. Yes, we're past K8 performance levels now, but Llano and Trinity (let alone Richland/Kaveri) still have it beat. You'd need some serious clock speeds to get decent performance and it's the wrong silicon for that. http://sn.im/28v1ckwReply

"Mullins seems like a good fit for a high performance Android tablet, but ..."

Mullins seems like a good fit for a high performance Android tablet, but HOW BIG IS THE HIGH PERFORMANCE ANDROID MARKET?

With limited resources and wafer supplies, led by Rory Read with business sense, AMD has been focusing on making money (the #1 common business sense) instead of BLINDLY COMPETING IN EVERY MARKET for the sake of conpeting and failing like before. Every business is a good business is a sales talk, but in reality not every business is a good business and pick the proper ones!Reply

"I’d expect a similar die size to Kabini/Temash. It’s interesting to note that these SoCs have a transistor count somewhere south of Apple’s A7."

Isn't this something of an apple's to oranges comparison?

This AMD SOC is basically CPU+GPU+memory controller.

A7 is all that plus secure storage, ISP, h264 encoder/decoder (the genuine low power deal, not some "hardware assisted" frankenstein that runs the CPU and GPU [together, both at high power] to do the job) along with god knows what else --- flash controller? fingerprint recognition cell?Reply

Kabini / Temash also full custom hw video encode/decode (all gcn based chips do), though if you want some hybrid mode is still available, so that should be pretty comparable. Flash controller and the like, too. Yes no ISP, but OTOH there's quite a lot of stuff the A7 won't do too (like 2xsata, the 4x1 and 1x4 pcie 2.0 connectivity, 2xUSB 3.0, high-speed i/o isn't exactly cheap). Anyway, the transistor count and die size is comparable after all (based on the official numbers, Kabini is slightly larger, but the a7 has slightly more transistors, though there's both different methods to count transistors and measure die size, not to mention they come out of different fabs), and it shouldn't be a surprise.Reply

I am eager to see how Mantle-enabled games will perform on these Mullins tablets. It seems a good fit from a technical standpoint. It might just push the PC gaming sphere to dig into tablet space. This in turn directly expands the market of game studios.

Also, I wonder if AMD's mobile lineup is to be the first product they'll roll out on Samsung's 14nm FINFET process. The process will be available starting 2015, as per their agreement. Its up to AMD to cook us a shrinked revision of these chips in a timely fashion.

It seems to me that performance numbers for these parts don't tell even half the story without the accompanying power readings, considering the 'use whatever power until the chassis burns the user' approach of AMD's turbo implementation.Reply

How AMD did this is amazing. Imagine if this was released instead of kabini/temash. This destroys Bay Trail. I only hope that it gets released soon so it doesn't have to compete with Intel's 14nm SoCs. Anyways, good job AMD!Reply

Would one way to test the "non-turbo" performance be to loop some test 100 times and see the performance decrease over time? Considering the turbo would decrease as the CPU/APU heats up we could see the performance difference and also how long you really get "turbo" turned on for.Reply

I am impressed, but I am curious as to both why Bay Trail beats it in the PCMark testing by a fair margin, but not in individual CPU benchmarks. If that is thermal limits...well, I will say that a lot of tablet workloads are very short term. Windows tablet workloads (at least mine)...not so much.

Enough of what I do would likely hit those thermal constraints and at least in my testing, my T100 doesn't clock down even under very prolonged workloads, like 15+ minutes of converting RAW to JPEG images. Or long gaming, like an hour or two of KSP.

That and I have concerns about that idle and low power use. Seems to be pretty good under higher load and performance seems to be there (with caveat/concern)...but idle and low power could be an issue. According to those AMD specs, the APU itself is using darn near 2w of power streaming 1080p. Based on my math, my T100 TOTAL uses around 2.4w of power when streaming 1080p (around 13hrs of run time, 31whr battery). I assume that the display, wifi, signal processor, memory, etc, etc are consuming more than .6w of power.

Having a much bigger battery or much shorter run time could be a big sticking point for a lot of tablet users (I know I'd have an issue if my 6-7hrs gaming/10hrs normal use/13hrs video turned in to more like 3hrs gaming/6hrs normal use/8hrs video.Reply

My next tablet will likely be a Windows 8.1 tablet. I'd love the high end AMD CPU tested here even if it doesn't do as well on power as Baytrail but bests it in GPU performance. Would be nice to be able to do better light mobile gaming.Reply